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Wednesday, 26 July 2017

Israel caught in a trap of its own making.

Ever seen how a jackal kills its prey? Usually, it doesn’t
kill it with one blow or bite? It surrounds it, it challenges it, it probes for
points of weakness. It then gets its claws around the neck of its prey and
won’t let go. Whenever the animal struggles it makes itself weaker.

This is what we have been seeing from Israel. We are caught,
like an animal, unable to shake off the obsessive hunger of those who have
their claws into us and want to kill us.

Like the wounded animal, we didn’t assess the threat, nor
appreciate the real danger. In nature, the targeted animal often appears to be
so powerful that it could easily resist the deadly jackals. They thought their
strong and non-offensive posture would appease the hungry killers into not attacking.

Like the wounded beast, Israel finds itself caught in a trap
of its own making. Like that animal, Israel is caught in the jaws of those that
want to destroy us.

How did we get to the point that a strong Jewish State is
strategically so meek that we have too readily surrendered Judaism’s most holy
site to a comparatively weak adversary? It’s down to a failed policy of playing
nice.

The thrilling historic announcement, exactly fifty years
ago, that “The Temple Mount is in our hands” was true – for a few days. Playing
nice began half a century ago when General Moshe Dayan countermanded Motta Gur
by saying about the Temple Mount “What is this? The Vatican?” and handed
the administration to the Muslim Council.
The battle then was not against Palestinians. Israel was fighting a
defensive war against invading Arab armies bent on our destruction.

The baying Palestinian protesters recently shouted that the
Temple Mount is for “Muslims and Palestinians only.” Jews and
Christians. Throw away your bibles. The Israeli Government has failed you.
Through a fear of being disliked, we have adopted an assimilated Jew psychosis,
of trying to appear nice or appeasing the goyim and the Muslims, yet we still
fail to win friends or influence people. It is we that are being influenced to
surrender all too often and too easily.

After the wimpish Israeli government capitulated to threats
and removed the security cameras and metal detectors, the Palestinian flag has
been affixed to the dome of the Dome of the Rock mosque and holy Muslim
worshipers are raining rocks down onto to the head of Jews (known in Islamic
circles as “apes and pigs”) praying at the Kotel below.

If the Israeli
government think that this will bring more than a temporary calm, they are
right. The tailwind is with the Jew haters and they will ride that deadly wind
throughout Israel until the leaders of the Jewish State demonstrate firmness
and determination to resist further erosion of our heritage and purpose for
being here.

We can feel the claws of our enemy embedded in our flesh.
Like wounded animals we are either frozen into inaction or, worse still, make
decisions that tighten their deadly lock on our carcass.

We may pretend that Jerusalem is the undivided capital of
the Jewish State but there are parts of Jerusalem where the municipality fear
to tread, places where obsessive Jew hatred and a desire to see the end of Israel
is growing. People are not aware that in this part of our “undivided
capital” football cubs play under the auspices of the Palestinian Football
Association and their champion team supervises soccer tournaments honoring
killers of Israelis without any response from our government against this
incitement to terrorism being practiced in Jerusalem. The government has
behaved in the most supine manner against this close and immediate threat. They
won’t stamp this out because they don’t want to upset anyone.

We have lost not only our courage but our moral compass.

We are in a battle for survival that can only be won by
victory over those trying to destroy us bite by bite.

Recently, NGOs came together to form the Israel Victory
Caucus. It brings the Congressional Israel Victory Caucus into the Knesset. We
hope this will instill backbone into the spine of our government.

The Israeli Government must open up to a serious dose of
strategic reality therapy. We are on the path to our own destruction. It is
time to go on the offensive with courage and commitment. No other remedy can
result in permanent peace.

Germany and Japan surrendered only after being brought to
their knees. They have since become leading advocates for peace and mutual
recognition. Using this analogy, only when the Palestinians have been brought
to the point that they admit defeat, give up on their obsessive Jewish hatred, their
feverish martyrdom complex, and an overarching ambition to destroy us, can any
form of peace take hold.

They are the ones, not us, who need to make painful
concessions.

As Daniel Pipes of Middle East Forum wrote in January, “True
peacemaking means finding ways to coerce Palestinian to undergo a change of
heart, give up rejectionism, accept Jews, Zionism, and Israel. Defeat compels
them to come to terms with their irredentist fantasies and empty the rhetoric
of revolution.”

To achieve that, Israel has to extract itself from the
psychological and strategic trap it has set for itself – before it is too late.

Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy
at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.
He is the author of “Fighting Hamas, BDS and Anti-Semitism,” and
the 2917 best-seller “1917. From Palestine to the Land of Israel.”

4 comments:

This is a powerful piece. And of course a lot of the incitement of Palestinians is led and fed from outside in worldwide media and institutions. I wonder if anyone thinks Israel should take a leaf out of the book of the Irish. Ireland (i.e. the Republic) is offering passports to anyone who can show they had an Irish grandparent - (even from Northern Ireland, which is one of the most patriotic parts of the UK!) Would it make a difference if Jews had Israeli citizenship without actually residing there, which for some people isn't possible or desirable?At the moment there is a lot of coercion to perceive ISRAEL as the country that has to be brought to its knees - like Germany and Japan - and unfortunately a lot of Jews don't know enough about zionist history, or only know it through enemy eyes or generations of Western journalists long ago nobbled by petropower.